Amazon Web Services is a set of primitive building blocks to enable developers to build applications and, ultimately, businesses, on our battle-tested infrastructure. So what kinds of building blocks do developers need? First, you need compute resources. The Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, allows developers to rent virtual computers, running in our data centers, and pay for them by the hour. Provision as many as you need – 1, 10, 1000, for as long as you need them, and you pay only for what you use (starting at 10 cents/hour). Next, you probably need somewhere to durably store and retrieve data. The Simple Storage Service, is, well, a simple storage service that allows to store and retrieve objects in the cloud using simple put and get API calls.You might need to index and query for that data, or create other structured data that you want to query, which is what we built SimpleDB.